[gerard.casey]

‘Reason’ [and its synonyms] is a term that, to use the words of W. B. Gallie, is ‘essentially contested”. It has a whole range of meanings in different contexts. The one you cite [case, explanation or justification of event] is a case in point. It usually is a response to a question such as “Why did he come to the meeting?” where the answer is held to embody the reason [e.g.”To make his case for a larger budget”]. In this sense of the term, reason is usually opposed to the notion of cause [i.e. efficient cause].

Reason is also used for the whole intellectual capacity of man or the specific intellectual capacity which allows us to move from one set of data to another. In this latter sense, reason is close to logic, being, as it were, the psychic source or ground of it.

[gerard.casey]

It doesn’t look as if the published is planning an e-version anytime soon. The best place to go for the paperback is The Book Depository [http://www.bookdepository.com/Libertarian-Anarchy-Gerard-Casey/9781441144676] which usually offers a discount and ships anywhere in the world free.

I hope you can get your hands on a copy soon and that when you do that you find the effort worthwhile!

[gerard.casey]

Sterling: This will amuse you (I hope!). While doing some early spring cleaning, I came across a book entitled, “What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty” (ed. John Brockman; 2005/6). Why I think this is amusing is because almost all the writers contributing to this volume are either areligious or anti-religious.

[gerard.casey]

Sterling: first, to come to the point raised at the end of your last post: Logic, formal logic, is concerned with inference primarily and only secondarily with truth insofar as truth is that which is, as it were, ‘carried’ by a valid argument.

Epistemology is concerned with knowledge and belief, the conditions for each, the relation between the two, and many other questions.

There is a field of study called the philosophy of logic which inhabits a no-man’s land between the two areas – for this, see, for example, Susan Haack’s “Philosophy of Logics”.

On your substantive point: one can believe things for a whole variety of reasons – because they are self-evident and just obviously so, or delivered to one by one’s tradition or culture, or something one read in a book or heard from a friend, and so on. There is no requirement that our beliefs be proved or provable before we are entitled to entertain them. Cardinal Newman, in his “A Grammar of Assent” challenged his readers (British, 19th century) by asking them how many of them believed Great Britain to be an island. Of course, the answer would have been, all of them. And then he asked how many of them had circumnavigated the island, or knew someone who had done so – and now, of course, the answer was, of course, practically zero. Yet, none of his readers doubted that GB was, in fact, an island. Newman wondered why this was so and pointed out that everything was for such a belief and nothing against it. All of English history, its trade, its relations with Europe, makes no sense unless GB is an island.

Most of our beliefs are held on little or no evidence at all – easy come, easy go. The flash point, as usual, is with religious beliefs. Recently, we have seen the emergence of a new and very hostile form of scientism, which is the 21st century version of the ultra-rationalist position Newman was reacting against. This holds that only that which is scientifically establishable may be reasonably believed. Of course, the very statement of this position is not itself scientifically establishable and so should, by virtue of that criterion, be abandoned! A corollary of this scientismic thesis is that only that can be believed which can be believed by all – but, once again, this position is incoherent.

Many religions have held that there is evidence for belief in God and in the holdings of particular faiths. Not everyone is persuaded of this but that in itself doesn’t establish the falsity of these claims.

[gerard.casey]

Back again, Sterling! That last paragraph of yours gave me quite a headache!

The concepts you make use of in your question – belief, assertion, fact, proof – are all of them highly contestable concepts in the theory of knowledge. Philosophers have spent much time and ink trying to tease them out and there is no universally accepted final analysis. Despite this, I’ll make a suggestion and you can let me know what you think of it.

The core of your question seems to rest on a distinction between a belief and an assertion with you suggesting (if I understand you) that the conditions that attach to the one may not attach to the other. Let’s take the following as examples:
A: I believe there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, and
B: There are fairies at the bottom of my garden

Proposition A, which is a claim about my epistemological states, is true if indeed I do hold such a belief. That belief would still be true even if there were in fact no fairies at the bottom of my garden.

Proposition B makes no necessary reference to epistemological or psychological states. It is true only if there are in fact fairies at the bottom of my garden. However, if would be distinctly odd to add to B “…but I don’t believe it!”

A belief can be, as it were, ‘raw’ (“I believe X”; “Why do you so believe?”; “I just do”) or it can be ‘justified’ (“I believe X”; “Why do you so believe?” “Because I have seen the evidence for X”).

The epistemic distinction between a justified belief and an assertion (leaving aside their psychological or linguistic differences) seems to me to be vanishingly small. If that be so, then the conditions attaching to truth or proof for the one attaches to the other, other things being equal. I repeat: I may be wrong on this, and there has been much vigorous discussion on these matters in philosophical circles.

The general point in my discussion of the fallacy in question is that, other things being equal, one is normally entitled to believe or assert X only where there is evidence for X. Someone who denies X is not normally required to prove that there isn’t an X. It is sometimes said that it is impossible to prove a negative but this isn’t always so. If you claim that there is an elephant in the room I can normally prove that there isn’t by conducting an extensive and exhaustive search of the room.

While the burden of proof normally falls on the assertor/believer, it can be the case, as Wittgenstein says in his “On Certainty” that doubt needs grounds. Children learn the power of the question early on in life and use it to elicit response after response until eventually their interlocutors give up in exasperation!

Reading through my response, I’m not entirely sure I have addressed your concerns. If you’d like to continue the conversation, please do so.

Once again, apologies for the delay in responding to you.

[gerard.casey]

Hello Sterling: I’ve just seen your post (it’s been a busy Christmas) so sorry about the delay in responding. I’m trying to get my head around your last paragraph so give me a little time to think about it and then I’ll get back to you.

[gerard.casey]

MarkHTR; You raise some really core issues. How often have you had it urged against you in debate – “You libertarians care nothing for the poor and disadvantaged. Let ‘em starve! All you care about is grimly and mean-spiritedly hanging on to your money.” This is a powerful rhetorical claim very often used against libertarians. It’s not always easy to respond to this claim, especially in the heat of battle. Could I suggest the following rough points?

When we talk about libertarianism and its social implications, we sometimes seem to be saying that our brave new world is just like the old not-so-brave world except that it doesn’t have (social) welfare. Do not allow this impression to form, not least because it isn’t (or shouldn’t) be true. Yes, we are opposed to welfare—all forms of it, corporate as well as social. But our key point should be this. Welfare programs and those who support them institutionalise poverty. It’s as if they were to say “You poor people stay in your ghettos and we’ll give you money, but don’t ever think that you have something to contribute to your family or community. Don’t ever think that you can make a life for yourself, develop and exercise your skills or grow in self-respect based on achievement. Just stay where you are and know your place.”

But the libertarian vision is not just the status quo minus welfare. It’s about a world populated by people, families and communities that are free to take responsibility for themselves and their dependents. The libertarian vision isn’t only about the elimination of all forms of welfare—it’s about empowerment through liberty, so that anyone who has any skill at all can make some contribution and so become not only financially self-sustaining but also socially responsible.

We cannot demonstrate the point but many libertarians believe that in a libertarian world, there would be very many fewer poor people. And yes, private uncoerced charity would be at least as good as current welfare programs at assisting those people, and very likely much better. (See Taylor 1984) We don’t reject voluntary ‘re-distribution’—we just reject the welfarist’s forcible redistribution of other people’s resources.

Welfarists are like a doctor who would say to a man with a broken leg: “Just stay on crutches and we’ll give you pain medication to help you get around”: the libertarian is the doctor who tries to get the man back on his own two feet as quickly as he can.

The writings of Charles Taylor are classics in their field. His Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 was published in 1984, with a second edition sometime in the early 90s. It’s still relevant though obviously, examples, figures, and stats would need to be updated. In 2006, he published In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. I haven’t read this yet so can’t vouch for it personally but it is surely worth a look.

[gerard.casey]

Pete: You’ve started a great thread, and have generated from your respondents much useful advice. Could I just add my two-cents’ worth?

There is a tendency to assume that everyone who engages with you is arguing in good faith. I’m afraid that’s not so. You can waste a lot of time and energy dealing with correspondents who seem to be deaf to everything you say, and unwilling to do the real work of thinking, reading and reflecting that’s necessary to a genuine conversation.

Michael McCloud’s Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion, and his More Secrets of Libertarian Persuasion have very useful hints and strategies.

[gerard.casey]

tourniquet84: that’s a really good idea. Watching debates, discussions on TV and analysing them is a really good way to hone one’s logic skills.

BTW; I clicked on the link you supplied and it to me to a brief case description. I couldn’t see how to get from there to a video report – I’m probably missing something obvious.

[gerard.casey]

David: I’m sorry; I didn’t see the earlier request on the General Discussion forum. Thank you for reposting it here.

The material I referred to is in the form of notes towards a project. It’s unfinished, fragmentary and definitely unpolished; moreover, it arrives at no definite conclusion.

Given its provisional nature, I would prefer not to post it online but I’ll happily email it to you, accompanied by a severe health warning.

[gerard.casey]

To mportillo14; Daniel Risberg; JohnD: Good question and good discussion!

Increasingly, in popular usage, the phrase ‘…such and such begs the question’ is used in discourse with the sense of ‘that gives rise to another question’ or ‘that presupposes another proposition’. I note somewhere in the lessons that it is probably useless to attempt to swim against the tide of popular usage at this stage and to insist on the logical meaning of the phrase.

As Daniel has neatly pointed out, the logical fallacy of BTQ is essentially that of assuming in a proof the very thing you are trying to prove. It’s rarely as obvious as, say, ‘Moral relativism is an untenable position because moral relativism is an untenable position”; more often, what is presented as evidence for a given conclusion is merely a verbal reformulation of the very conclusion one is aiming to establish. as, e.g. ‘Moral relativism is an untenable position because one cannot hold moral positions that are relative.’

Of course, such an argument form is formally valid! Quite clearly, if P is true, then P is true! The fallacy is informal because, of course, we want P to be derived from something other than just P.

Sometimes, BTQ is used to describe a form of circular argumentation, as in some of the examples Daniel provides in his second post.

I’m not at all confident that this is a ‘more structured and thorough answer’ that Daniel was certain I would provide but I think the material covered in the posts effectively gives the essence of the fallacy.

As I mention in the lessons, the material on the fallacies, though it has been around in one form or another since the time of Aristotle, has never achieved a universally definitive formulation. While there are many books and articles on the subject, some popular, some technical, the lists of fallacies, the precise definition of the fallacies, the typology of the fallacies – all these are theoretically contested matters. The good news, however, is that an acquaintance with those fallacies on which there is more or less a consensus will stand one in good stead in practical argumentation even if borderlines remain disputed and theory contested.

[gerard.casey]

Mises007: tried to email you the PDFs (Book and Article) at rgafni7@gmail.com but my email bounced back to me again, giving me an ‘unknown address’ error message.

[gerard.casey]

Mises007: I reproduce your new argument here for the sake of anyone else who might be following the discussion:

You wrote:
“Premise 1: If I own x, I can defend my ownership of x against all aggressors
Premise 2: Trespassers are aggressors
Premise 3: Those using my property without my explicit permission are aggressors
Premise 4: My body is my property
Premise 5: A fetus is trespassing my body and using it to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Premise 6: A newborn child still attached to the umbilical chord is using my body to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Premise 7: A parasitic twin is using my body to sustain itself without my explicit permission
Conclusion: It is morally acceptable to abort parasitic twins, fetuses and newborns still attached to the umbilical chord on the grounds that they are trespassing on and/or living off my body.” [end of citation of your argument]

In our logic, every argument capable of evaluation is either a categorical syllogism or a hypothetical syllogism. In each case, an argument will have two premises and a conclusion. Our rules for validity operate only on arguments in such forms. Your new argument, as it stands, isn’t either a categorical or a hypothetical syllogism [it’s got 7 premises and a conclusion!] so it’s not capable of being evaluated (as it stands) by our rules. Of course, it may well be possible to turn your argument into a form that is capable of being evaluated by our system. This will most likely transform it into a set of interconnected arguments, each of which can be evaluated separately. Before going on to see what I’ve made of your material, you might like to try your hand at reconstructing it in categorical or hypothetical form yourself.

Let’s start with your premise 3. This looks as if it might be a categorical proposition. Let’s take as our terms:
P: people who use my property without my explicit permission
G: aggressors
This should give us our premise 3 as: PAG [All people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
[n.b. If I was to be absolutely precise, I’d reflect the negative element in the subject (‘without’’) by means of a complement, but I’ll ignore that for the sake of simplicity]

Now let’s turn to premise 5. Here our terms might be:
F: foetuses
P: those who use my property without my explicit permission
Giving us: FAP [all foetuses are people who use my property without my explicit permission]

Now we can put the newly reformulated premises 3 and 5 together to give us the following

categorical syllogism I:
PAG [all people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
FAP [all foetuses are people who use my property without my explicit permission]
therefore
FAG [all foetuses are aggressors]

We can construct similar arguments taking the material in your premises 6 and 7 and, substituting for F in the foregoing argument N: umbilically connected newborn children and T: parasitic twins, respectively, we get categorical syllogisms II and III:

categorical syllogism II:
PAG [all people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
NAP [all umbilically connected newborn children are people who use my property without my explicit permission]
therefore
NAG [all umbilically connected newborn children are aggressors]

categorical syllogism III:
PAG [all people who use my property without my explicit permission are aggressors]
TAP [all parasitic twins are people who use my property without my explicit permission]
therefore
TAG [all twins are aggressors]

All three categorical syllogisms are valid (check for yourself, using the six rules for validity).

[Your premise 2 appears to be redundant. We can already get from lack of explicit permission to aggression without invoking trespass.]

Now we’ve dealt with premises 3, 5, 6 and 7 and eliminated 2 as seemingly redundant. That leaves 1 and 4. How can we use this material to get us towards your overall conclusion?

I suggest a slight reformulation of your premises 1 and 4 to get the constituent sub-propositions of what will be our hypothetical syllogism to connect up, as follows (using the simplified single-letter form of the constituent sub-propositions for the sake of simplicity)

Hypothetical Conditional Syllogism IV:
1a: If S is a person who owns x, then S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend x against aggressors [If P then Q]
4a: S is a person who owns x (her body) [P]
therefore,
8. S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend x (her body) against aggressors [Q]

This hypothetical conditional syllogism is valid.

Let’s now combine the conclusions of the valid categorical syllogisms I, II and III into the following composite categorical proposition, 9:

9. All foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are aggressors
Letting W stand for the composite term: foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins
this gives us the categorical proposition: WAG

Putting premises 8 and 9 together, we get (in English)

S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend x (her body) against aggressors
All foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are aggressors
Therefore, S is a person who is morally and legally entitled to defend her body against all foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins

Intuitively, this seems to be valid. Let’s try to put it into symbols:

We have the following terms:
S: S (anyone at all)
D: persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against aggressors
W: foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins
G: aggressors
giving us the following two propositions:
8a. SAD
9. WAG

If 8a and 9 constitute the premises of a prospective syllogism, we have a problem inasmuch as we appear to have 4 irreducible terms.

Let’s see if we can reduce the four terms to three. A bit of material eduction seems to be in order to link up the terms D and G.

Example: from the proposition ‘A horse is an animal’ we can validly conclude that ‘The head of a horse is the head of an animal’ (by complex conception—lecture 6). Similarly, from WAG [All foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are aggressors] we can materially educe “All persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins are persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against aggressors”

Let W(2) stand for “persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins” and we already have what would be G(2), namely D: “persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against aggressors”.

So, 9—WAG transforms by material eduction into
9a.W(2)AD

And now the premises of our would-be syllogism are
8a. SAD
9a W(2)AD
and we’d like to get as our conclusion
10. SAW(2)—“ All Ss are persons who are morally and legally entitled to defend x (their bodies) against foetuses, umbilically connected newborn children and parasitic twins”

As the result of our application of material eduction, these two premises together now have 3 and only 3 terms but, unfortunately, since the middle term is D and it isn’t distributed in either premise, any syllogism formed by adding any conclusion whatsoever will be invalid by reason of failing rule 5 (the middle term must be distributed at least once). If only we could validly convert 9a!

Even if, on another reformulation, you could validly connect up the results of the two different trains of deduction, you would have established only that your argument is valid, i.e. if its premises were true, its conclusion would have to be true. The task of establishing the truth of your premises would still confront you and it is to establishing the truth of the premises that the argument would then shift.

[gerard.casey]

Hello Mises007: I’m working on a substantive reply to your new argument. In the meantime, I tried to send a copy of my book to you at rgafni7@gmail.com but for some reason, my email bounced back. If you would care to send a contact email to me directly at gerard.casey@ucd.ie I’ll send the material by return.

[gerard.casey]

JohnD: I’ll send you an electronic copy of my book on Monday when I return to the university. If I can find a copy on my home computer, I’ll send it earlier. Whenever I find it, I’ll send it to your personal email as I think it would be more appropriate to keep this forum focussed on logical matters to the extent that one can draw a line between form and content.

[Author]

Posts